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It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Too long a while. That’s mostly because I’ve been playing Dark Souls III – a review I want to write soon, but one that I’m not sure I can do justice.
In the meantime, I have played another board game with Chezni at our FLGS. This time, the game is Boss Monster with its expansion “The Next Level.” When we first played this some time ago, it seemed a tad simplistic, but with a lot of potential. Now that we’ve played with the expansion, I can say definitively that the game – as it comes out of the box – is disappointing. The typical game goes something like this: You are the boss of a dungeon, à la Dungeon Keeper (the original, not that abomination). You build a dungeon using card “rooms,” and heroes come to attack you and the other players based on the room card treasure types (of which there are four). You have a rather limited pool of spells you can use to help yourself or hinder the other players, but they are sorely underused. There is very little interaction with the other players beyond choosing your dungeon treasure specialization. Once you’ve built a reasonable dungeon, the game becomes a bit of a slow plod to the victory condition (beating all the heroes or acquiring 10 hero souls in our game). This is quite sad, since the rooms and spells are varied and interact with each other in interesting ways.
So here are the problems: First, spells are criminally underused unless you fall into the “Mage” category of dungeon (even then, the rooms which allow you to draw spells are typically underpowered). Second, games are either too short (with normal victory conditions) or far too long (with the alternate game modes). Finally, interaction with the other player dungeons is almost nonexistent and the heroes themselves aren’t unique or interesting enough to provide challenge or variety enough to make this a good game. This is terrible, since the cards themselves are well-made, pretty, and well-balanced. Chezni and I spent some time trying to fix these problems, and here’s what we came up with:
Changes:
- Draw a room card OR a spell card at the beginning of each turn, and remove all the “Haunted Library” cards from the deck.
- In a two-player game, set the win condition to 20 points. In general, increase win conditions for fewer players and increase loss conditions for more players.
- In a two-player game, remove half the ordinary hero cards if you are playing with the expansion.
- Set a maximum for +x spell cards to +3 for balance.
These changes allow for an early race to build a suitable dungeon, but ensure that once you have a good enough dungeon you are able to focus on inhibiting the other players by drawing spell cards instead. Since the Sorcerobe School cards do essentially this, it makes sense to just remove them from the game. Increasing the victory condition allows you to have a more entertaining game by ensuring you get epic heroes and good use out of spell cards. Together, these fixes bring this game from “okay, but flawed” to “actually fun”; or, in PICD terms: from Tier Three to Tier One.
EDIT 2018-10-03: We have confirmed that this is a fun game with the above changes for two players. Adding spells makes the game far more dynamic and interactive – things can change quickly and there’s a lot more play between bosses, rather than just running your own dungeon.